How to Make a Polar Panorama in Photoshop

Polar Panoramas, also known as Pano Planets and Polar Planets, probably won’t be the next best selling photographic service to make you millions, but it is one of the most rewarding ways you can display your landscape photographs. While the results are rather eye-catching, these images are in reality very easy to make, requiring only basic Photoshop skills. Best of all, once you have selected your photo, the tutorial takes less than 5 minutes to complete!

What exactly are Polar Panoramas, you might be wondering? A Polar Panorama is created by twisting a 360-degree panoramic image, into a circular shape to form a little planet.

How to make a Polar Planet in Photoshop:

Step 1: Selecting a photo
The easiest way to create your own Polar Planet, is to start off using a 360 degree panoramic image. If you do not have any existing panoramas, you can also use a cropped landscape photo, just ensure the length of the photo, is at least twice as long as its width.

When choosing your image, keep the following in mind:
• The bottom quarter of your image should have little detail, and be as uniform as possible (i.e. water, sand, grass etc) because this area will be distorted the most, and will form the centre part of your planet.
• The upper quarter of the image should be sky. This will create the space in which your planet will be floating.

If you are using a cropped landscape image, the left and right edges of the photo should be as similar as possible, and the horizon must be exactly level in order to create a planet that joins seamlessly. If necessary, crop and straighten the image, otherwise your planet will have a great big crack resembling a vertical cliff face.

If you do not have an existing landscape image that matches the all the above criteria, select a landscape photo and create a mirror image panorama by using the following steps:
1. Open the image in Photoshop
2. Duplicate the Background layer
3. In the Image menu, select Canvas Size, and make the new canvas size twice the length of the existing photo, and select the side anchor.
4. Create a new Guide in the centre of the image by clicking on the left ruler, and dragging your mouse across the image and releasing the mouse button in the middle of the canvas, thus separating your photo and the white canvas.

Step 4: Apply the Polar Filter
In the Filter menu, select Distort, and then select Polar Coordinates. In the pop-up window, make sure Rectangular to Polar is selected, and click OK. This is where the magic happens…

Step 5: Final adjustments
You may need to touch up where the left and right edges merged, and tinker with the contrast, colours and rotate your planet to your liking.
I like to overlay textures onto my Polar Planets, to create a more dramatic and animated feel.

And there you have it – your very own little planet! I’m sure you’ll find this technique as addictive as I did, and soon you will have your own magical solar system of tiny planets!

Optional extra:
If you leave out Step 3 and do no rotate the image, you end up with a reverse effect that is quite out of the ordinary too.

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